The Rain in Spain

¡Buenas dias amigos! It´s a Sunday morning here in Madrid, and skies are looking muy gris. It´s been raining on and off since Saturday, making weather quite cool, but a little miserable to walk through. But as a tourista, you suck it up and try to do what the madrileños here do: enjoy life.

After a long day of walking around on Friday, checking out the Real Jardin Botanico and Parque del Buen Retiro (the two big parks in town), Eric and I grabbed some food over at the Spanish equivalent of a convenience mart (the Spanish also have those triangular sandwiches). We also bought some cheap wine and went up to our rooms to inbibe awhile. What´s fascinating about our room at the Hostal Metropol is that if you look out the window, you can look straight down onto the plaza and see all the people scurrying about. It´s almost as if you´re playing God, or it´s your own live version of "The Sims" going on before you. People hooking up with people. Party people going pub crawling. It´s a people watcher´s dream come true. For 2 hours, I hung out the window, drinking wine and watching my own little soap opera take place in front of me. I couldn´t have asked for better entertainment on a Friday night. My friend and I then went downstairs to the hostel restaurant/bar to watch a complimentary flamenco dance take place, complete with Spanish guitarist and singer. I would be afraid dancing the flamenco with a professional...they´d crush my feet with all that stomping. The flamenco appears to be Spain´s version of Appalachian clogging, except with a lot of dramatic arm movements and dress swishing. Pretty cool.

All day Saturday was drizzly. We had a late start getting going. While Eric was passed out, still recovering from jet lag, I caught up on my reading about Madrid and listened to a few podcasts on the city. To save some money, I went over to the convenience store again, stocked up on lunch meats and cheese for sandwiches, then came back and had lunch while Eric regained consciousness. We then took off to find tickets for either a bull fight or football (the European kind) game. We got lost, but bumbled into some odd event with thousands of madrileños standing in line to get into one of the court/government buildings. It must have been really important for them to be standing in the drizzly rain, and there were camera crews. We then went down to the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia to see some modern art (it was free day there on Saturday). I got to see Picasso´s Guernica, which was a big deal for me. I never realized how big it really was. I also never realized it was all in black, white and shades of grey. They had other stuff by Dali and Miro there, but the Picasso stuff was what made the museum.

We made a quick detour over to the Atocha train station to see where the bombings happened back in 2004 that killed 191 people and injured 1755. They had a memorial built inside the station: a giant well in the ceiling with expressions of horror written in multiple languages. Not a happy way to end the day. So we then wandered back towards our hostel, found a place to have tapas and sangria, then went back to the hostel for a night of beers and card til 2 in the morning. Madrid´s the party city, so you have to stay up late like the locals and live it up.